So, After Andre's ravings about the preemptible kernel patches by Robert Love [1], I decided to give it a bash. I built an SGI CVS 2.4.14 kernel with XFS, preempt, and Win4Lin support.
My whites were whiter, and colours, brighter. [ Jamie: It kicks arse. ] What really surprised me was the interactive performance of Win4Lin. Obviously, running Windows under Linux is always going to be a heavy task, even operating the thin driver layer that Win4Lin does. The preempt kernel makes it very smooth, especially for things that really push the driver interface between Windows and X, such as playing high framerate video. Without the preempt patches, Windows (controls and window frames) would become unresponsive whilst video was playing, so you couldn't skip, stop, start or move windows, etc. With preempt, it's *almost* fully responsive. Noice. My only trouble is a full machine lockup when Win4Lin shuts down. Frustrating, but one gets what one deserves running Windows. :) With this fixed, I'd very, very strongly recommend using the preempt patches for Win4Lin users who are familiar with rebuilding their kernel. I'm sure this would assist VMware in a similar manner - anyone willing to take the test? :) Thanks to Andre for convincing me to try. ;) - Jeff [1] New version out: http://lwn.net/2001/1115/a/preempt.php3 -- It makes perfect sense. If you're a narcissistic arsehole spawned from a curdled gene pool. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
